mistake by doobybrain, on Flickr

Okay, so here’s the thing; if you want to have any kind of integrity you have to be ready to say that you were wrong, when you figure out that you were in fact mistaken on something. It is never a fun thing to do, after all who wants to admit to a mistake? Still it is something that has to be done.

All of this is prefacing, you guessed it you smarty-pants you, me owning up to a mistake. In last nights Water Cooler I was talking about the S&P change in their forecast for the United States bond outlook from stable to negative. It gave me a good hook to point out that the Republicans are bat-shit insane on their policies for dealing with the imbalance between our revenue and our spending. That part I stand by.

However I should have thought who this was coming from and what it might be intended to do through more. This is where I made a mistake. The S&P does not really have a whole hell of a lot of credibility. After all they were the ones that were issuing AAA ratings to the securitized mortgages that pumped up the housing market and nearly ruined the world wide financial market. For that matter they were the ones that failed, completely to predict the resulting crash.

Given that I should have been more… skeptical of the source, even if it did make for a good hook to hammer Republicans. Good hook or no it was and is a mistake to take them at face value and then use their actions for my own purposes. It was more than a little intellectually lazy.

However, the folks at this site did a pretty good job of pointing out the problems. I want to single out Selsie for her comments and her post on James Galbraith, which should still be in the recommended list today.

Getting some more information changed my position on accepting what S&P have to say on this issue and thinking that they might in any way be an objective or disinterested observer of this situation.

So, back to where we started. I have come to understand I made a mistake. It was an honest one, but one that I felt I need to own and now I do.

So, what is on your minds tonight Firedogs? The floor is yours!

Bull Fight 7 by George L Smyth, on Flickr

Today the consequences of having a “Know-nothing” party as one of two political parties became even clearer (as if not paying for two war, and a major Medicaid increase while drastically cutting taxes for the wealthy were not enough evidence). Standard and Poor’s lowered it outlook on the United States being able to pay its debt in the future.

Was it because we have massive deficits? No not really. Was it because we have a ton of debt built up by giving millionaires and billionaires tax breaks in order to spur economic growth that did not happen? Not directly.

The reason that the S&P is down grading the likelihood of the US meeting its debt obligations is actually because they do not believe that there is any chance of real fundamental agreement on what steps need to be taken before the 2012 elections.

Yep, that’s right. The S&P thinks that there is no chance that there will be enough adults in the conversation about our revenue issues before the country gets to decide if they want to keep any or all of the Bozo’s in Washington. Now, ya’ll know me, I am going to say that for all the weakness of the Democrats, they are not the ones insisting on illusionary solutions to a real world problem.

In fact I can demonstrate that the galling and frustrating compromises that we have seen over the last six months on this very issue show that it is not the Dems who are so intransigent and oblivious to the reality of the situation that they will play political games with the economic health of the nation. That falls the Republican Party, and solely to that party.

Democrats are not the ones who insisted that we lard up an already huge tax break renewal with another 700 billion for in breaks for billionaires. Democrats are not the ones that have just passed an new Budget Resolution that would drop the top tax rate by 10%. This is a budget that claims to balance the budget but it will actually add 7 trillion to the debt over the next decade and won’t balance it until, wait for it, 2081 if it ever did.

Democrats are not the ones who are insisting that tax increases are “off the table” from the very start. No friends and neighbors, that is the Republicans and their insanity has gotten so bad that the S&P does not see how we can get past this issue until there is a new election, in 17 months.
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